Seeing wood, trees and forests

However, when sustainable forestry is appropriately viewed as a cycle of harvest and regeneration at a landscape scale, a very different picture emerges. By design, sustainable harvesting - as is the aim in those Australian forests where it is permitted - means that the annually harvested volume obtained from a pre-determined portion of the designated available forest has been calculated to match the annual growth of the available forest as a whole. Accordingly, even as carbon is being removed from one part of the forest in wood products and waste, it is being simultaneously recaptured in the rest of the forest both in areas previously harvested and regenerated, or in areas yet to be harvested.

If the sustainable harvest volume has been correctly set, there should be no net loss of carbon from designated wood production zones.

Although wood production is now limited to within just a net 6 per cent portion of Australia’s public native forests, it generates economic activity in rural areas that provide the stimulus to maintain access infrastructure and local workforces at levels capable of actively managing fire which, along with climate change, is the greatest threat to the ecological integrity of our forests.

In view of its limited extent and its benefits, the manufactured hysteria that continues to surround sustainable Australian wood production is reflective of the environmental movement’s uncompromising advocacy of an overly-simplistic and ill-considered ideology that locking out human activity is necessary to safeguard ecological integrity.

The folly of this has been demonstrated around Australia in recent years where plummeting levels of active fire management due to a lack of resources have been acknowledged as a critical factor in the intensity of wildfires that have had a severe impact on biodiversity.

Unfortunately, Australian environmental activists are also likely to advocate this “lock-it-up-and-leave-it” approach as the solution to tropical deforestation when the best outcome is far more likely to be a mixture of forest reservation and the rationalisation of local timber production to a highly regulated, sustainable footing. This would conserve forests in perpetuity while providing a secure socio-economic base for those poor communities formerly reliant on illegal forest exploitation.

Although for many Australians it may be both counter-intuitive and politically incorrect to believe that cutting down trees could ever have a greater good, when undertaken within the context of sustainable wood production it makes a sensible and significant contribution to combating climate change.

Unfortunately, the saga of the Tasmanian pulpmill seems to have entrenched public discourse on forestry issues in an emotional, highly-charged brawl.

All too often this sees those who really know about the issues being berated or dismissed by uncompromising opponents lacking credible arguments and unwilling to allow their pre-conceived views to be challenged. This is a disturbing social phenomena which is likely to consign the sensible management of forests to ongoing irrational conflict both here and overseas.

Ultimately, if the community cannot accept that sustainably producing essential materials from a naturally renewable resource is part of the answer to climate change, there is probably little hope for the planet.